Seven months after the incident, it’s safe to say that the Obama administration successfully ran out the clock on the Benghazi consulate attack. After initially deflecting responsibility onto an inflammatory internet video that nearly nobody had seen, the company line morphed into: “We’re still investigating” and “Those responsible will be brought to justice” — all the way through the November 2012 election. Now, whatever press coverage the incident still garners is more about the Republicans in Congress who continue to ask questions and hold hearings, as if the real news is some bizarre GOP obsession with Benghazi. The story’s slow demise was punctuated during Hillary Clinton’s January hearing, with her indignant huff: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Perhaps unintentionally, the secretary made a good point: In our ADD world of the 24-hour news cycle, last fall would have been the more opportune time to get to the bottom of the incident. And it should have been the reddest of meat for a once-inquisitive White House press corps: repeated warnings ignored; pleas for additional security that fell on deaf ears; a seven-hour window in which no military assets were deployed; and, as we later learned from then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, a president who was AWOL all night after his initial security briefing.

Compare that with the media’s dogged coverage of a scandal from the George W. Bush years: the Valerie Plame affair. It was a tale so convoluted that each new article required several paragraphs of exposition, if only to remind the reader of the alleged crime and why it mattered: former ambassador to Iraq Joe Wilson, yellowcake uranium, a trip to Niger and CIA operative Plame, Wilson’s wife, publicly outed as “revenge.” After two years of dutiful, if repetitive, front-page coverage, the end result of the grand jury investigation was a perjury trap for one of Dick Cheney’s senior staffers.

Conservative complaints about the kid-glove press treatment of the current White House are nothing new, but Benghazi was the icing on the cake. In short: Four Americans were killed during an extended, meticulously planned terrorist attack on sovereign U.S. soil, and all on the anniversary of 9/11. Despite all that, even CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” once famous for its hard-hitting interviews that could make even the most powerful pol or corporate shill squirm in his seat, fell prostrate before the president and Mrs. Clinton: The best that reporter Steve Kroft could offer was: “I want to talk about the hearings this week. You had a very long day. Also, how is your health?”

And while the press generally worked itself into a lather over the covert status of Ms. Plame, it had no problem dropping a dime on the SWIFT wire transfer program, which the George W. Bush administration had used to track the movement of terrorist funding. That, according to the New York Times’ Bill Keller, was in the public interest to disclose.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, however, agreed to help suppress a story, at the request of the Obama administration, about a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia. The rationale? It might embarrass the Saudi government.

So, exposing the Bush administration’s anti-terror programs is done in the public interest, but media self-censorship at the behest of the Obama White House is done in the interest of national security. (And, unlike the SWIFT program, knowledge of the drone base location would have had no impact on the behavior of the terrorists: The aircraft’s point of departure is rather immaterial to the chap on the receiving end of the warhead.) A curious and skeptical press is the natural counterweight to those who wield political power, as the natural inclination of the latter, in the face of uncomfortable circumstances, is to dissemble, obfuscate and spin. And if nobody is going to challenge them on it, why on Earth wouldn’t they? CBS’ Steve Kroft later explained his softball interview by saying, “(Obama) knows that we’re not going to play ‘gotcha’ with him we’re not going to go out of our way to make him look bad or stupid.”

Coming from the show that practically pioneered “gotcha” journalism, it’s a startling and sad admission.

A columnist for the Wall Street Journal once summed up President Obama’s meteoric career arc by writing, “(His) great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.”

Watching the press collapse into obsequiousness toward the current White House, one can’t help but find a corollary at work: Too many people are afraid to be thought of poorly by their peers for potentially casting this president in a poor light.

Matthew Bastian lives in Hamilton. He works in the financial industry.